The Two Faces of Gulen and the Gulen Movement

Positions taken by Fethullah Gulen and the Gulen Movement seem to mutate according to expediency. Some examples are listed here.

Gulen does not support any political party "Mr. Gulen insists that his movement keeps equal distance from every Turkish government, seeking no office --- and also from foreign governments." - from the New York Times, June 11, 2010

Gulen supports the AKP:

"Recently, the movement largely dropped its neutrality principle and supported the AK Party in the national elections of July 22, 2007."

"Half a dozen U.S. Senators and a few dozens of U.S. Representatives made a strong showing at the reception and the Gülen Movement hinted that its new assembly has some muscles to flex in Washington already."

"Stating that the perpetrators of all the military takeovers in Turkey -- Sept. 12, 1980, March 12, 1971 and May 27, 1960 -- staged these coups to seize power and maintain their authority, Gülen said: “Some people needed seas of blood to sail their ships. They split the sons of this nation into camps of leftists and rightists and they made them clash. In the end, they made use of the blood and tears they led to in establishing their own pavilion [of command],” he said.

Terming the coups as “the products of a miserable mentality,” Gülen underlined that those who carried out bloody coups and shed the blood of sons of this country by splitting them into camps are the same who are feeding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) now."

"Gülen sympathised with the 1980 coup too, regarding it as appropriate and necessary that the state protect itself and its citizens against the chaos and violence that was threatening to engulf Turkish society."

"Several articles exhibit a bit of the obsessive antagonism towards the West that can be found in some Muslim circles. The West as a whole is characterized as a black hole of materialistic impulses with no appreciation for spirituality or religiosity of any kind. This anti-westernism might be a strategy for Hira' to appeal to the strongly anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, but it risks undermining the universal religiosity that the magazine claims for Islam."- from a Gulen conference paper on Hira Magazine, an Arabic-language Gulen Movement publication